What if You Just Hate Making Dinner?

Though I’m a woman with children, I should confess that I’m not the target mom-reader for the latest avalanche of family cookbooks, which bear titles like “Dinner: A Love Story” or “The Family Cooks.” This is my shortcoming: Where I ought to have a lively intellectual curiosity about food preparation, I generally have a despairing blank.

“Have you figured out dinner yet?” my daughter Susannah, who’s 5, asks me. Figure out. Not “fix” dinner; not “make” it. She gets that phrase from me. A vague neural itch sets in around 5 p.m. when I recognize that something must happen, and soon, involving plates and macronutrients. I do not move. Dinner preparation is all mental around these parts: I figure out who’s had enough protein or carbs for the day, who can bear eating the other’s favorite food, or whether I must figure out two meals; figure out which is more endocrinologically devastating, highly processed soy milk or not-entirely-organic lactose-free cow’s milk.

Then comes the real intellectual heavy lifting, revisited like a private, pointless Fermat’s Theorem: Why is food such a big part of rearing children? Why me? And why can’t I just crack open a half-dozen Clif bars and keep playing with my children?

Cooking! Aren’t we past that? In 1982, Jessica Lange as Julie, the glamorous single working mother in “Tootsie,” became my ego-ideal when she sexily told Dustin Hoffman’s character that she was a “born defroster.” Lord, how I loved that expression. Women of the ’80s did not sweat meal prep for their little Amys and Scotts. They defrosted. They took children to diners and bars. They ordered pizza.

That was ages ago. And I imagined that matters would only improve from there. By the time my son arrived, I vainly believed that I should be able to not just defrost food but conjure it — by means of the web or a 3-D printer or at least a game male, close at hand, whose ego had been serendipitously formed by Emeril or “Top Chef.” But instead, to my horror, home cooking had made a hideous comeback. Noble food philosophers preached the retro virtues of slow, real food instead of the quickie, frozen stuff that had once spelled liberation to me.

And worst of all, as the mother-cookbooks make painfully clear, the daily work of feeding children doesn’t fall to the sages. Neither does it, notably, fall to the dads, whom the cookbooks commend for having signature dishes or being grill-masters, but not for punching the clock at breakfast, lunch and dinner. No, cooking belongs, inevitably, to the moms. I’ve tried to find outrage among my sister mothers about this reactionary development. But here’s the unkindest cut: It turns out that other women — traitorously — now like to cook. They find cooking expressive and fascinating. No one but me wants to be a born defroster anymore. “I hear you, but I like to cook,” said one feminist the last time I tried my bold association of foodism with rank misogyny.

“I like to cook”? What about “I like not working and having no opinions and being everyone’s handmaiden”? Hasn’t women’s false consciousness about their “preferences” always been a part of the sexist equation? Or is theirs the true 2014 consciousness — the liking to cook — and I just would have fared better in the heyday of Salisbury steak? (Dr. J. H. Salisbury, wouldn’t you know: Civil War-era food faddist and earliest known carb-hater.) Among my newly foodie friends, I couldn’t get a witness to my bewilderment. At the same time no MakerBot is going to roll in and cook for my family. I’m going to have to find an apron and make real food happen daily for my children, lest they be poisoned by phthalates, dextrose and heavy metals while I’m pretending to be Jessica Lange.

Thus we get the mother cookbooks, stuffed like Cornish hens with their whimsical anecdotes and their photos of stylish children helping to cook like cheerfully indentured galley slaves. These books do much more than prep you to opine grandly on nutritional fallacies. They bark out actual marching orders for making meals. The lively food seminar, which only demanded that I read and talk, is over; the dread hard labor of cooking has begun. Not only are these women (or their trusty co-authors) ace home cooks, they have also figured out dinner once and for all and are extraordinarily self-assured about their axioms. They heard the clarion call of real food a decade ago and resolved (for Empire?) to work tirelessly over hot stoves to save our sons and daughters from the packaged and the processed and the highly destructive myth of low-fat.

I find discouragement, typically, on Page 1. In the introduction to “100 Days of Real Food,” Lisa Leake calls my hasty, anxious, food-delivery way of figuring out dinner “fall[ing] prey to” the lure of convenience. That is indeed what I feel like at dinnertime: prey. Instead of hunting down healthful, real, inconvenient food, dinner-shirkers like myself are menaced, in Leake’s dark vision, by such predators as restaurants, takeout, “cans of cream of mushroom soup” and what she calls “even the occasional frozen dinner.” That includes virtuous-enough-seeming Amy’s Kitchen burritos and Health Is Wealth chicken nuggets. (Die, born defrosters. Your glory days are over.)

Leake outlines her own Puritan conversion narrative in which she progressed from a bleak existence, blinded and hobbled by the Standard American Diet (SAD, so sad); through faith healing at the hands of the real-food evangelist Michael Pollan; to a wholehearted embrace of organic living and her own blog-and-cookbook ministry. A version of this conversion informs several of the family cookbooks, and the story never fails to move me. I want to eat these women’s dinners, sure. But more than that, I covet their confidence.

“I don’t think there is ONE THING MORE IMPORTANT you can do FOR YOUR KIDS THAN HAVE FAMILY DINNER,” is how Ruth Reichl, of Gourmet, is quoted (italics and caps not mine) in “The Family Dinner,” by Laurie David, with recipes by Kirstin Uhrenholdt. Pomposity of this kind abounds in Laurie David books, and ultimately the books’ apotheosizing of home cooking is more memorable in its aggression than the somewhat meeker recipes (Easy Cheesy Dinner Frittata, Turkey Meat Loaf, Your Favorite Grilled Cheese). No one thing more important for children than family dinner? I might have put “send them to school” or “hug them occasionally” at the top of that list.

Such bunk continues in “The Family Cooks,” another production by David and Uhrenholdt, who turns out to be David’s private chef. (Aha, the secret to “The Family Cooks” is . . . the family cook.) This time the book has Katie Couric laying down the law: “The single most powerful thing anyone can do to protect their health, to live a healthy life and to have a healthy future is to go into their own kitchen and cook food themselves.” As if to blow all these superlatives away, David eventually brings in the master stylist and vegetarian-food thinker Jonathan Safran Foer for the coda to “The Family Dinner.” Foer’s own “food is everything” aria does not disappoint: “Every meal,” he writes, “is a chance to get it right or get it wrong, to approach or withdraw from our ideals. Does anything in our lives matter more than how we set our tables?” I tried hard to connect this question to the Easy Cheesy Dinner Frittata but couldn’t. I’m telling you: I’m not cut out for this.

As the high priestess of family cooking, Jenny Rosenstrach, author of “Dinner: A Love Story” and “Dinner: The Playbook,” aims to bring about conversions in her readers and not just chronicle her own. In the opening to “Dinner: A Love Story,” Rosenstrach recounts how a friend broke down in tears admitting that she never once cooked for her children. This is evidently not the first such overwrought disclosure with which Rosenstrach has been entrusted.

“No one has it all together,” Rosenstrach observes, with gentle condescension. The typical mom, she believes, too often sees dinner as “a referendum on her own self-worth.” Alas, for me, Rosenstrach’s path out of guilt is not to drop the guilt but to drop the no-cooking. You must start, as her sobbing friend did, with Rosenstrach’s introductory absolution. Don’t “put so much pressure” on yourself, she writes, elsewhere assuring the reader, only slightly facetiously, that mothers who don’t dine nightly with their children won’t necessarily make them “meth addicts.” So that possibility is out there, too.

After that thin buck-up speech, you’re encouraged to embrace Rosenstrach’s strategies for cutting up onions and enlightening picky eaters, along with her recipes for Sweet Barbecue Salmon and Beluga Lentil Soup With Anchovies. That is the way out of wretchedness and into grace. Dinner: Go and Sin No More.

Figuring I wasn’t going to experience a spiritual revelation about the sanctity of family dinners at this late stage, I dropped the conversion-narrative books in favor of some that sound like brass-tacks science. “Super Nutrition for Babies: The Right Way to Feed Your Baby for Optimal Health,” by Katherine Erlich, M.D., and Kelly Genzlinger, C.N.C., C.M.T.A., with a foreword by David Brownstein, M.D., author of “Overcoming Thyroid Disorders,” seemed with all those enigmatic letters to fit the bill. As did “Super Baby Food: Your Complete Guide to What, When and How to Feed Your Baby and Toddler,” by Ruth Yaron. (Dr. Alan Greene calls the original “Super Baby Food” a “monumental breakthrough.”)

These books remind me of the extruded foodstuffs in packages festooned with the names of medical doctors that real-food ideologues now counsel against. You can really taste the research. But the books, unlike Clif bars, didn’t help me skip any steps. In fact, they introduced many, many new steps, including making yogurt.

D.I.Y. is Ruth Yaron’s way. “After years of trying to find the easiest, most effective and ‘least dishes to wash’ method of making yogurt,” Yaron came up with a regime that involves organic soy milk enriched with calcium and vitamin D, dry milk powder, a yogurt thermometer, a “homemade yogurt towel bag,” yogurt starter, a small sterilized glass baby-food jar, sterilized utensils and about six hours from start to finish. Another hot tip for the new mom making yogurt in her down time: Make sure you don’t bake bread on the same day, lest the yogurt is invaded by airborne yeast particles. That’s interesting. When I discovered my own easy, effective and “least dishes to wash” method of procuring yogurt — buy it — it took me only 15 minutes, with no worry about yeast invasion. Maybe I’m doing something right after all.

In “Super Nutrition for Babies,” D.I.Y. is not celebrated for its own sake. Rather it is a paranoid strategy for those who live in terror of the Toxins. The book argues that there is a war on children’s health going on, and that the enemy army includes pesticides, pollution, heavy metals, medications, industrial waste, chemicals, bad tap water, dyes, artificial ingredients, preservatives, sugar, refined grains, antibiotics and wrong ratios of macronutrients. As budding foot soldiers for health, mothers are taught to fear food that is Chemical, Removes body’s nutrients, is Addictive and Processed. CRAP, in the book’s scheme. Everywhere.

“Super Nutrition” instructs readers on avoiding diabetes, optimizing immunity and reducing inflammation. There are not too many recipes here, although there are incoherent juxtapositions: Blueberry Breakfast Crepes With Raspberry Syrup, with coconut and ghee, runs up against Yorkshire Marrow Custard, which uses marrow bones and heavy cream. This is for babies, remember. Bone marrow and heavy cream for infants. It doesn’t ring right. But I’m learning to distrust my intuition. And yours, too.

Nothing in these latest family cookbooks, with their conversion narratives, their personal-chef lifestyles, their nervous science and their strained insistence on the supremacy of family dinner has done anything to quiet my brain on the subject of why it’s my problem — and that of the world’s mothers — to make nightly sense of this ideological convulsion over food. If anything, they fuel the panic; they are the panic.

The silver lining is that when they (and I) stop perseverating on food anxiety, the cookbooks — especially the ones by Rosenstrach, and also “Bébé Gourmet,” by Jenny Carenco — feature dozens of extraordinary-sounding recipes. Carenco’s Baby Beef Bourguignon, with its dry ham and caramelized chestnuts, looks like a dream. And Rosenstrach, especially, never seems to go wrong: Her Buttermilk Oven-Fried Chicken lets you use highly processed, shelf-stable Kellogg’s Corn Flake Crumbs along with cayenne and four cups of buttermilk. Also glorious-sounding is her Pork Shoulder Ragu With Pappardelle.

For a time, I stopped trying to figure out dinner and just stared at the recipes, with their line breaks like poetry and the unpretentious photographs, most of which do not seem styled. Just braised pork, being pulled off the bone with a fork on a wooden cutting board. Wow, it looks so delicious. I sure wish some mother would make it for me.